Walk the Line

WALK THE LINE Review:

I've talked on here about my growing appreciation for the music of Johnny Cash over the last year or so. So I have really been looking forward to this movie for a while, and it didn't disappoint. Like a good Cash song, this movie sticks inside your brain and refuses to leave - it's simple yet ressonant, deceptively powerful. Firstly, the performances in this film are great. Joaquin Phoenix is great here. While he looks and sounds differently from the Johnny Cash most are familiar with, at the same time, he embodies Johnny Cash in an eerily accurate way. He lacks the exact look - the craggy face and old-past-his-years visage, and he lacks the exact sound - the deep gravel in his voice and always earnest tone. But yet ... he is very, very, convincing. And in terms of his acting, of his ability to draw you in - well, the mimicry is almost spot-on, but the performance as a whole, well, it's a home run. And Reese Witherspoon ... she has come a long way here from Legally Blonde. In easily her best performance yet, she is charming and subtley pained as June Carter, Johnny's unattainble object of delirious affection. And hey, X-Files fans, Agent Doggett, aka Robert Patrick, does an awesome job here as well as Johnny's disapproving father - in a scene-stealing performance. This movie, for what it is, basically fires on all cylinders with superb acting, rousing musical set-pieces, a deliberate but absorbing pace, and moody, era-evoking cinematography - taking us back to the birth of rock and roll in a land populated with the likes of Elvis, Orbison, Dylan, and more. But what is this movie? Well, it's less a full biopic and more a love story between Johnny and June. And it's a very, very good love story - inevitably an Oscar-worthy one at that. But I did leave with a feeling that it oculd have been slightly more, as the movie stops short of giving us a full picture of the life of Johnny Cash. When the courthsip between Johnny and June is over, so is the movie, even though it feels like there is so much more to tell, and a larger context that the whole thing should be put into. We get intriguing hints of something more - scenes of Cash mixing with other rock legends, of his desire to represent society's outcasts (ie the transcendant concert scene in Folsom Prison). When I got home from seeing this movie, I watched the amazing music video for Johnny Cash's cover of NIN's "Hurt", released in the months between June's death and his own, and it left me dying to see how the Johnny Cash from Walk The Line became the wizened, fatherly, world-weary Johnny Cash from "Hurt." I guess there is only so much you can put into one movie, and I did just complain about Harry Potter's lack of focus, but I do think that an extra ounce of context would have pushed this movie from the realm of "great" into that of "classic." As it is, the main focus, the love story, is presented with all the drug-fueled passion and fiery angst that seeped into so many Cash songs of the time. The power of this movie is that it will make you need to know more about Johnn Cash - you will need to hear his music, need to find out what happened next, and need to learn about his place in rock history. And most likely, you'll have his infectious songs stuck in your head for days to come - I know I do.

My grade: A -